First, the political conversation on Twitter appears to be very time-sensitive. Most of the tweets on Senate reform happened on Day 1 of the news story when the government tabled reform legislation. For each subsequent day, the conversation’s volume decreased exponentially, essentially dying off a week later.

That’s not entirely shocking. The harum-scarum nature of the medium generally — not to mention that Twitter tends to augment the scattershot approach to information — assumes a kind of initial digital cacophony that tails off as the audience moves on to a new topic, leaving a pile of urls in its wake.

Samara also considered the substance of the conversation. According to their “quick and dirty” analysis, the discussion on Senate reform was split between those who looked at the “politics” of the topic, the actual issues surrounding reform, and those who talked about the process of passing the legislation.

The Samara blog doesn’t reveal how many of those tweets were submitted by political journalists, staffers, MPs, strategists, or other interested parties, and how many were by interested and engaged citizens. The defining lines between the two might be difficult to gauge, but it would be interesting to see who was conducting the more substantive analysis of such topics as Senate reform. It could give us a better idea of whether #elxn41 informed more people or was instead a large echo chamber.

Also interesting (though again, not entirely surprising):

There is some evidence that Twitter users are somewhat more likely to voice opposition rather than support about political issues. For the most part the tweets we looked at were neutral about Senate reform. But almost a quarter of the tweets in our sample explicitly expressed negative comments about the issue, outnumbering expressions of support by a factor of four.

It will be interesting to see, with further study, whether Twitter has a prevailing bias, either left or right-of-centre.

In online conversations the prevailing modus operandi is to complain, rather than support. That, in turn, could be based on the inherent one-upmanship of the service. Cutting comments tend to gain multiple re-tweets that create a quasi notoriety (albeit a brief sort). While Twitter hasn’t replaced online comments, in some ways it’s similar – equally cynical, if perhaps slightly less acerbic. There’s a name and face associated with many accounts, after all.

Happily, Samara is going to continue (and expand) its study, so keep an eye on their blog.